Change Management

 

This year has been full of change, more than usual it feels like. It seems like it's happening to everyone, not just me. Heard so many stories from friends and family that make this year seem more overwhelming than most. There was no shortage of bad news during the first half of this year and it's not over yet.  It feels like we have been chasing an imaginary goal to bring things back to a normal state. 

The real problem with this plan is that change truly is inevitable and normal is always changing.  While we try to make the world around us more comfortable to what we have been used to, the world continues to evolve in ways we never imagined.  Just because everything is changing we shouldn't worry too much because our core beliefs still hold true and if a change truly works better it will stick around for a while and if it doesn't it will change.  

This weekend marked the autumnal equinox and you can see signs of changing seasons everywhere. Tree leaves are changing color and falling.  Weather is getting cold quicker at night and school is back in session. Personally I am going through lots of change this next week so it seemed fitting to make this post, got a new job with lots of new and exciting challenges, seems like it will be good, but it's much harder going from 4 months off to back to work. Will have to hit the ground running, but that's the way I like it.  

One thing I've learned over the years is embracing change generally leads to the best success and personal satisfaction. Resistance is futile when change is inevitable. New schedules will mess up routine but optimizations can be introduced to make a change more tolerable. Now for the tricky part, practice adapting to change whenever possible to become a more resilient human.  Take a lesson from the change management playbooks used in critical infrastructure, every change is reviewed regularly to help communicate intentions, plan for possible impacts, and stay prepared for back out and recovery plans if a change fails.

Cheers to change! For the better, worse or otherwise it will continue to happen!

Banjolele and Bass week

 

Decided to pick up the banjolele I had purchased a few years ago.  I was initially excited for the possibility of a tiny banjo like musical instrument one drunken night and purchased it on Amazon. When it arrived I spent about a week learning to play it and then ended up with a random injury on the pinky finger of my plucking hand.  It was a just a scratch in my opinion, but over a few weeks became very infected and uncomfortable. It sort of became a saga of it's own leading a journey of recovery that lasted months.  But enough about fingers, this is a post about banjolele's for those interested.

So after what seems like an eternity of lacking inspiration, I picked up the little fella this week and decided to learn a few tunes.  There's lots of great content online to teach you songs and proper methods to practice and I also have an eBook to dust off (Clawhammer Ukulele: Tabs and Techniques By Aaron Keim). It's a great book on the clawhammer technique which gives the banjolele the unique banjo twang. Some enjoy it more than others, although it's much different than playing bass. Still fun to play and unique in it's own way.  The finger picking style used for banjo maximizes the notes you can play in a strum sort of like playing triplets with a bass.  

I don't plan on becoming an expert at it, but knowing how to strum a few tunes made my week extra nice. Until next week, keep on doing your things, and just be happy!

Adversary Emulation

 

Did some playing with Caldera the other day...

More details to come as I learn more but for now let's just say you don't need rocket appliances to run this tool at home. Any old laptop within the past 10 years'ish will generally do. I'm sure there are some exceptions. I also managed to get the recently released OT plugins uploaded for bacnet, DNP3, and modbus with hopes of testing soon. So far I've only deployed a couple agents on sacrificial Linux hosts in the home lab.  I felt like I barely scratched the surface of capabilities of this tool, but it was very painless to setup, and includes impeccable documentation and training support.  Kudos to the folks at Mitre for releasing another great tool.

Until next time, keep on tinkering!

Brewing again... (part 2)

 

So no that the general brew day process planned out, time to figure out the grain bills.  I have an amber ale and a dark IPA in mind. The recipes I picked are both based on two-row malt barley and I have some old grains I want to use up also. The additional ingredients needed will cost about $40. This is a supplemental challenge so we'll be short on a few things but all sorts of odds and ends to choose from for specialty malts. The plan is just add in whatever I have kicking around clearing out some old ingredients I would have otherwise thrown out. This will be a journey, the recipes will be brewed on separate days allowing me to work out the bugs. 

I expect to make a few mistakes on along the way but I also want to experiment with a more casual brewing process, in the past I was pretty stringent in following the recipe and it works but can be stressful resulting in unwanted anxiousness on brew day. What I want to figure out, if there is really a big difference in the outcome if you switch up a few things?

I put in my order with the local brewing supply store and decided to wing it a little.  The schedule and recipe generally goes like this:

1. Thursday - pick up ingredients and mill grains. I plan on doing these recipes on different days but might as well mill everything at once, while we have the equipment out. I use a power drill to run the mill saving my arm from a lot of cranking.
   
2. Friday - 1st Brew - Fat Tire Amber Ale remix - most of the regular grain recipe with a few minor improvisations but swap out hops completely.  Instead of Willamette and fuggles, I had picked Citra, Lumberjack to  start and Simcoe hops to finish. Why? Well why not? It's for science! I also planned on dry hopping this batch but changed my mind in the end - let's try to keep it simple.
   
3. My memory on how to brew was rusty so I spent some time reading brewing books, comparing ideas and notes from past brews.   
1. As expected I messed up a little on brew day, but I think brewing can be a forgiving process as long as you keep it clean and be patient.
2. I put the Citra and Lumberjack in just before the wort had boiled - or so I thought - it ended up being another 20+ minutes before we say any signs of a rolling boil so altogether the Citra and Lumberjack stayed in about 90 minutes - and boil start was significantly delayed by the hop oils. It might end up a little bitter?
   
4. After brewing the wort, it's important to quickly cool it down to ~68 F before transferring to a fermenter and pitching the yeast
5. Then you monitor the fermentation process for 5-10 days
1. Should  start to see foam forming on top within 48 hrs
2. The airlock will bubble steady until fermentation is complete.  Watch for slow bubbling (i.e. 1-2 bubbles per 60 seconds)
3. Some yeasts will react more aggressively than others.  Some will have 1-2 inches of foam throughout the process while others may require intervention to prevent the fermenter from exploding at their most active time (definitely not a wanted outcome).
   

 

Brewing again ... (Part 1)

 

Decided to pull out the brewing gear after a few years of inactivity.  Brewing during COVID did not work out for many reasons - but mostly because I would have drank way more.  I think it's a good time to get some practice brews in and experiment a little more than before so here's a little mini-series about how it has progressed.  

This series of posts is intended to help future me remember how to brew again.

Keep in mind it took about a day to prepare and find all the brewing gear I had "strategically" scattered around the basement through various basement emergencies in the past 3 years.  This post will never help me with that however, I just need to be more organized about storage and perhaps brew more frequently.

Luckily there were some old ingredients safely stored which I was able to incorporate into the recipe.  About 25 lbs of two-row barley and a variety of specialty malt grains will fill in two recipes I had good success with in the past. While I was a little short on some ingredients I decided to improvise.  Also there was a cider kit that I've convinced myself is worthy of experimentation so after making the first brew I planned to reuse the yeast for the cider kit to see how it turns out.

For planning a brew it's important to have everything you need for brew day:

1. Clean and sanitized equipment
1. Brewing vessel/bucket/carboy
2. Kettle(s)
3. Stir spoon
   
4. Hoses and siphons
   
5. Hydrometer and sample tube
   
2. Malts/grains/hops are measured out and any whole grains milled coarsely
1. Grains will be added to large brew in a bag to steep in the brew kettle
   
2. Hops can be measured and placed in cloth bags to add to boil as needed
3. If you are limited on hop bags just tie the bag so it can be reopened but tight enough where it will not open on it's own.
   
3. Water is prepared and ideally room temp (to speed initial boil). 
1. Use Camden tablets or balancer chemicals if needed
2. I usually use tap water in recent brews but in the past have used store bought water jugs
4. General Notes
1. Initial brew to bottle time is 1-2 weeks for most standard recipes
2. it's best to track activities along the way, especially when you find a good process and want to replicate it later. 
3. Use a beer brewing notebook or template to keep track of all the important variables.
4. Original Gravity will be the reference point for initial alcohol potential. The final product may be lower or higher than expected from this initial reading but it's a good estimate.  Hydrometer or a good refractometer will be required for this measurement, it's also a good excuse to taste a sample
5. Final Gravity measured at bottling time can then be used to calculate the alcohol content of the brew after the yeast and enzymes have done their work  
• The simple calculation for ABV = (og – fg) * 131.25
• Online calculators use a more advanced formula for higher gravity beers ABV =(76.08 * (og-fg) / (1.775-og)) * (fg / 0.794)
  

Starting over

Crazy how time flies... I had big dreams for this blog but didn't do a whole heck of a lot with it yet. That's the key word 'yet', there's still time to get better and improve focus! We only have some much time on this planet, some say we should use it wisely. Some other people say to have no regrets, live life in the moment, one day at time.  I say whatever works for you - just do your best while handling all of life's curveballs, and accept that bad and good stuff will happen in life. It's a dream to think only good things will happen. I think there's also common sense in setting out with a plan to succeed and changing when needed.

So what's my goal now? Why all of a sudden now?  With news of the big G getting out of the domains business what will happen to elmatto.ltd?  Well, so far sounds like business as usual until the acquisition is complete. So for now, the goal is simple, use the domain services I've been paying for and work on my writing.  I have some ideas for some posts related to industrial cybersecurity, beer brewing, and other nerdy home projects.  Occasionally may post some health related content because we all need a little more self care and encouragement in this world. Be nice to one another and don't be afraid to hi-5 the occasional stranger, you may never know how much they needed it.

Until later, take care my friends!

El Matto

How to take down your free cloud account before it costs $$$

 OK so the time has come, we are all done with our Juicebox CTF and other experiments and the $100 credit is nearly running out (if you did it right).   The follow instructions are my quick reference notes, but really there's a great article here that provides a nice walkthrough: this is where i started.  https://www.websiteplanet.com/blog/cancel-digitalocean/

1) First things first - backup your data.  

    * I also recommend exporting terminal history so you can recall setup commands for future projects.

    * Using WinSCP or other SSH based file transfer tool (even windows 10 supports this now)

        https://winscp.net/eng/docs/guides

        https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/terminal/tutorials/ssh

2) After your data has been copied off the systems you setup, you can shutdown the VM's

3) With that completed, now you need to remove any special DNS settings (i.e. if you used a registed domain for any of your VM's  

    * In my case I had a google domain associated with it so referring back to my previous article, I undid the config settings both in Google domain services and Digital Ocean

    * After this step your domain is only referred through Google DNS so any VM's host records tied to this are gone, from this point on you will only able to connect with the cloud providers account console or if you ssh to the IP of the vm directly

4) Now we need to destroy the VM (and any others)

     * Now there's multiple prompts to makes sure you aren't making a mistake, but once completed they are gone

5) Now you can go to account settings and deactivate the account - make sure you purge your data 

    * After this your account is gone, bye bye, syanora, hasta nunca test VM's!

    * Don't forget to fill out the customer survey - you had some fun through their kindness, the least you can do is tell them what you think of the product, your input may even help make it better. (no royalties likely, but bonus gratitude is still worth it hehe)

Now to try out some other cloud services ... like Oracle Cloud Platform, why not give it a whirl ... look forward to more posts.  Until next time!